A blog to improve poster presentations.
Illustrae is software for creating scientific illustrations. Let me hit what might be the most relevant feature of this product for many readers right at the top: There’s no free version to try. For that reason, I cannot review the software. I am not able to throw down money for a subscription to try this product right now, not even a temporary subscription. But I wanted to write a post pointing…
If, by chance, you are planning to go to Bordeaux this year to attend the Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting, the organizers have created this great prep session. Warning : Contains me. Notwithstanding my own pleasure at being asked to participate, I think this is a fantastic service from the organizers. Too many conference organizers put up very minimal guidelines for presentations, and…
One of the wild things as you get older is that you find yourself thinking, “Hey, when did that movie /song / TV show come out? Must be, like, five years ago now.” And you look it up and it’s over twenty years ago... We’re not quite at that point yet, but it’s a little surprising that this is the seventeenth blogiversary for Better Posters! The blog is certainly in its cranky teenage years, and is…
In one month (or less, depending on when you read this), I will be giving a free online talk, thanks to the kind invitation from the good people at Reproducibility 4 Everyone ! If you can’t scan the QR code in the image above, please use this link to register for this free webinar ! External links Reproducibility for Everyone
I’ve said in this blog that “ Your title is 90% of your communication effort , because that’s all that most people will ever see.” Well, I exaggerated. Your poster title is probably about 75% of your communication effort. A couple of months ago, a paper came out that looked at “Sharing without clicking” on social media. We’ve all done it. It’s faster and easier to click that little “Repost” button…
A unique account of a non-traditional conference poster (pictured) with non-traditional goals. (T)he question of the purpose of the academic conference, and the AcademicConferenceMachine. Linares-Roake JB, Zawadzki JA, Zawadzki SJ. 2026. Plugging it in: This is really interesting, but what are you going to do with it. puntOorg International Journal 11 (2): 219-236.…
Look at this beautiful art by Yuefeng Song. What’s lovely about this is not just the illustration, but that it is Figure 6 in technical paper in an academic journal. It’s not done just for press releases or social media or some other more media to promote the paper. It is in the version of record, and that’s wild. Academic journals are normally conservative and slightly staid. It a little…
From Pedro Veliça on LinkedIn .
I want to thank Sasha Aspinall for sharing this award winning poster. Click to enlarge! Sasha wrote (lightly edited): I presented this poster at a back and neck pain conference in Quebec City. I’m really proud of it, and drew a lot of inspiration from your blog. I was surprised that it won best student poster, and I attribute a lot of that to the design. I put a lot of work into the design, in…
I watched this video about comics. I wasn’t aware of Nick Sousanis before. In his introductory remarks, he briefly describes a teaching exercise he uses called “Grids and gestures.” In a technical paper, Sousanis (2015) wrote: In comics, not only are we concerned with what goes on in each frame or panel, but we also need to attend to the size and shape of individual panels, their orientation, and…
Friend of the blog Natalia Asari has already shared a poster with us . But It’s been a while, so you might ask, what else has Natalia been up to? Click to enlarge! Natalia wrote: This poster was for a conference which switched from being in-person to completely online. I did it in landscape mode, which is better for computer screens. In Brazil and Europe the room for posters is usually for a A0…
We have two posters today from contributor Nicole Ackermans! This first poster is from a Mount Sinai Annual Neuroscience Retreat. Click to enlarge! Excellent concision in the text. This poster is about 300 words long. This poster impresses with the simplicity of the text, which could carry over into its visuals. The background are the glowing effect on the title are making the poster look…
Today’s contributer is Antonia Hadjimichael . She sent a pair, presented in no particular order. They were both presented at the American Geophysical Union in the same year. You can click the enlarge the first... ...Or the second! Antonia wrote: I don’t get to do posters often and it was an exciting challenge! For someone who doesn’t do posters often, she certainly rose to the challenge! What…
It’s been a month. What has happened around conference poster sessions? • • • • • The quest to perfect the online poster session continues! Macarthur and Drude posted a slide deck with a brief explanation of how they created a small online poster session using ThingLink. This allows you to create an online space that people can navigate through, click buttons to bring up specific posters, and…
Today we have a trio of posters from Stephen Kutos. Click to enlarge! This is the first of the posters chronologically, and already shows a lot of sophistication in the design. There are usually few white on black posters at large conferences, and they stand out from the pack. The poster has a clear visual hierarchy: the network diagrams get the most real estate, and there is a clear “What’s the…
I’m always pleased to show an award winning poster! This week’s poster is courtesy of Audrey Kelly. This poster won the Victor Hutchison Graduate Student Poster Award in Ecology, Natural History, Distibution, and Behavior, awarded by the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. (Whew, that’s a mouthful!) The award is given at the Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Audrey…
Friend of the blog Mike Taylor gave me the okay to share this poster some time ago. Get out your 3-D glasses, and click to enlarge! This poster has, dare I say, a touch of elegance to it. Part of what gives this poster its style is the serif type. At a glance I was reasonably sure that it was not Time New Roman, which a closer inspection confirmed: The downward serif on the “2” is very…
I spotted today’s poster when researching the Woodstock of Biology 2 + Night Science conference for the June link roundup . I reached out to its creator, Jakub Zeman, who sent along a copy and how he made it. Click to enlarge! I’ll let Jakub tell the story from here (lightly edited). Our model focuses on how pluripotent stem cells develop into cardiomyocytes. Cells make multiple decisions over…
Let’s see if I can get back into a regular rhythm of posting these! • • • • • There continues to be a small group working on creating posters by computing methods. A new preprint by Pang and colleagues not only dives into poster creation, with a program called PosterAgent, but how to evaluate computationally generated posters, called Paper2Poster. Existing poster assessment rubrics are not good…
This week's is courtesy of the extremely patient Dimitra Bezantakou. Dimitra was nice enough to say that she found the blog helpful as she was creating the poster below. Click to enlarge! This is a common three column poster, but there are a few things that help set it apart. Bolding key words and phrases in the introduction makes reading the text faster. The text has ample spacing, which also…
The good people at ePosters asked if I would write something for their blog, They asked nicely, so I said, “I’ve been meaning to write about flash talks where people pitch their posters. How about that?” They said, “Okay.” 👍 And now it’s done and up. Please visit ePosters for “ How to pitch your poster in a flashy lightning talk .” I hope you enjoy!
Over a year ago, I saved a few tweets about controversies that erupted over a couple of posters at a Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. At the time, I was aware that there was a lot of discussion on social media but didn’t have the bandwidth to follow it closely. Today I went looking for summaries of the controversy, and found a couple, which I have linked below. I don’t…
Some time ago, Greg Fell shared an interesting poster . (You may not be able to see it due to user settings.) I reached out to the creator, Anton Pottegård. He sent a slightly earlier version of this poster. Click to enlarge! This poster does a couple of things. First, it draws inspiration from an existing design that people already understand . Second, it is memorable because it breaks from the…
If you are looking for a rubric to assess conference posters quickly, this might fill the bill. This rubric has gone through a couple of versions. This is the most recent, presented on a poster this summer and archived on ResearchGate . There are four categories: Layout Science-based order (IMRAD) Use of graphics Central message communicating (Wordy and / or busy) Each of these categories gets a…
It’s been a while since I’ve had the brainpower to pull one of these together. But now? Since its debut, the billboard format has been admired and disliked. A new paper compared it to more standard layouts, and found it generally came out ahead. But the variation is wide! The authors write: Both poster formats could reach high scores for all items, which indicated that mindful poster layout is…